find and replace in multiple files on command line

Question

How do i find and replace a string on command line in multiple files on unix?

possible duplicate of [Find and replace a particular term in multiple files](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2263925/find-and-replace-a-particular-term-in-multiple-files) — Quanlong, Jun 11 '15 at 15:35

score 50 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 13 '09 at 07:14

50

there are many ways .But one of the answers would be:

find . -name '*.html' |xargs perl -pi -e 's/find/replace/g'

answered Dec 13 '09 at 07:14

Vijay

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Stan · Answer 2 · 2015-01-29T10:14:44.133

37

Like the Zombie solution (and faster I assume) but with sed (standard on many distros and OSX) instead of Perl :

find . -name '*.py' | xargs sed -i .bak 's/foo/bar/g'

This will replace all foo occurences in your Python files below the current directory with bar and create a backup for each file with the .py.bak extension.

And to remove de .bak files:

find . -name "*.bak" -delete

edited Jan 29 '15 at 10:14

answered May 04 '11 at 12:38

Stan

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This affects whitespace outside of the search. It seemed to add new lines to the end of each of my files. – Shane May 09 '13 at 17:38
AFAIK in-place editing is not supported in every version of sed; I think it's a GNU extension. – al45tair May 13 '13 at 14:06
it's a gnu extension and at least in my version it has to be `sed -i.bak` (no space) – friede Aug 28 '14 at 16:00
my version works with -i without needing to specify .bak extension – mvallebr May 20 '15 at 13:59
This fails if you have a folder named ".py" – swpalmer Sep 18 '15 at 00:12
This will only touch files and won't generate .bak files: `find . -type f -name '*.py' | xargs sed -i"" 's/foo/bar/g'` – Seán Hayes Jun 05 '18 at 23:43

score 7 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 13 '09 at 07:27

7

I always did that with ed scripts or ex scripts.

for i in "$@"; do ex - "$i" << 'eof'; done
%s/old/new/
x
eof

The ex command is just the : line mode from vi.

answered Dec 13 '09 at 07:27

DigitalRoss

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This has the distinct advantage that you can perform more sophisticated edits. – al45tair May 13 '13 at 14:10

score 6 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 24 '13 at 16:42

6

Using find and sed with name or directories with space use this:

find . -name '*.py' -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/foo/bar/g'

answered Aug 24 '13 at 16:42

XavierCLL

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score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Dec 13 '09 at 08:33

2

with recent bash shell, and assuming you do not need to traverse directories

for file in *.txt
do
while read -r line
do
    echo ${line//find/replace} > temp        
done <"file"
mv temp "$file"
done

answered Dec 13 '09 at 08:33

ghostdog74

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find and replace in multiple files on command line

5 Answers5

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